User Profile

Character Name: Tobias
Series: Animorphs
Gender: Male
Age: 15
Species: Human, but permanently trapped in the shape of a red-tailed hawk. Tobias only looks human at intervals.
Sexuality: Straight and more or less in love with Rachel

Appearance: Tobias has two shapes--well, more than that, really, but hawk and human are what he is. Both of them. As a human kid Tobias looks like your typical white kid, often dressed well because Rachel picks out his clothes for him, though his default outfit after morphing to human is an embarrassing concoction of spandex. He has messy, dirty-blond hair and dreamy eyes that are a grayish-blue color. Prior to becoming a hawk Tobias usually looked like one of those spacey kids who was off in his own world; nowadays his expressions often reflect the hawk side of his personality, being impenetrably intense.

As a red-tailed hawk, Tobias...looks like a red-tailed hawk. His feathers are mottled brown and white, with more brown in his back, wings, and face and more white on his underbelly. His impressive wingspan is about four feet, five inches in length, and sharp, raking talons and beak complete the set. His eyes are amber as a red-tailed hawk and appear to be perpetually glaring. As the hawk's name suggests, the long feathers of his tail are brick-red.

(If it please the court, I'm going to be finding a PB for Tobias in human form, since in most graphic representations--book covers and TV show--Tobias has brown hair, which is simply not in line with canon.)

Personality: Once a dreamy, spacy kid to match his looks, Tobias really did live off in his own world--a defense mechanism for the general suckitude that was his life before becoming an Animorph. He was the kid that no one wanted, and not having much in the way of social skills he didn't know how to make friends or handle bullies, so he simply retreated into daydreams. At his core he was, and still is, a quiet, thoughtful, gentle person, who lives by notions of honor and doing the right thing. That somewhat chivalrous soul now inhabits the body of a red-tailed hawk, and combined with the hawk's predatorial instincts Tobias has changed a great deal from who he was before gaining the ability to morph. He's become much more intense and focused, and lives fully in the day-to-day now, because hey, what dream could possibly be weirder than being a human kid in the body of a bird of prey, fighting aliens and slugs who want to crawl in people's ears and take over their brains? He's retained his gentleness and thoughtfulness, aspects of his personality that clash with his life both as a soldier and as a predator. Tobias must kill to eat, and kill sentient beings to survive, which he does without hesitation. But he doesn't hate his enemies, and he maintains that when he kills, whether they are animals or Yeerks, he does it out of necessity, not hatred or love of war. Next to Cassie, Tobias is possibly the most moral of the Animorphs. Although he doesn't emphasize with their enemies as readily as Cassie does, usually falling back on a predator's detachment, he does raise questions about the moral rightness of the Animorph's plans, particularly when innocent people are going to be involved, and often backs up Cassie's objections. He takes pride in who he is and where he comes from, much of that influenced by Ax. He admires the Andalites' sense of chivalry and honor and tries to emulate it, particularly after finding out that he's descended from Andalite warriors. Tobias is sharply intelligent and has a good sense of humor, though often a dry and deadpan one.

Abilities: Like all of the Animorphs, Tobias can acquire the DNA of any animal (humans and aliens included) and morph into their shapes, taking on all their natural strengths and abilities. Very early on Tobias became what the Andalites call a nothlit, a person trapped in a morph (the red-tailed hawk in Tobias's case). Later, thanks to the interference of a god-like cosmic being known as the Ellimist, Tobias was able to morph again, and acquire himself, that is, his old human form. Like Ax, this will be the only morph he finds himself able to perform in Manhattan.

Tobias will also find himself physically weakened in Manhattan, especially as a hawk. This, combined with weakness that will result from difficulty finding food (Tobias can only eat meat, and there are no animals in Manhattan for him to hunt, so when fresh meat runs out that's a big problem for him) will result in flying being a much more strenuous activity for him. In Manhattan he'll still be all right--pockets of warm air or thermals rising from pavement and office buildings will buoy him up--but since there are no thermals over the water, any attempt Tobias makes to fly off of the island will be so tiring that he'll quickly have to turn around lest he lose strength and fall into the water to drown.

Weaknesses: Due to his dual-sided nature Tobias is someone who is never entirely certain of who he is. Is he human, or is he hawk? Is he a predator, or is he a sentient being outside of predator-prey constructs? Is he just meant to kill, or does he have the ability (and the right) to let logic and reason influence his actions, to choose what to protect even when he kills? Most of the time Tobias manages to navigate these philosophical questions, but they occasionally trip him up and cause him a lot of mental anguish as he tries to figure out how he should be living his life.

It could be said that Tobias is afraid of his human side, and maybe no wonder--his human life was one of emptiness and forced isolation. As a hawk he is still somewhat isolated and set apart from his friends, but at least he has the sky. It's this sense of freedom that drives Tobias to remain a hawk even after he gains the power to morph back to human. On the always-temporary occasions he does revert to his old human body, he's made constantly nervous by the lack of his usual sharp senses and natural weapons, as well as the presence of people around him. As revealed when Tobias was viciously tortured, he sees his human side as something weak, hateful, a trap to him--he retreated into the uncaring consciousness of the hawk in order to survive the torture, and nearly lost all sense of who he is. He often finds himself relying on his friends, particularly Rachel, to remind him that his human self is not his enemy.

Manhattanite or outsider? Outsider

History: An orphaned child, his parents apparently dead, Tobias was shuttled from an uncaring aunt to an uncaring uncle, having no real home, no one to love him, and no one he could call his friend. In middle school one of Tobias's classmates, Jake Berenson, protected him from a couple of bullies, which led Tobias, at least, to consider Jake a friend. Through Jake he met Rachel, Marco, and Cassie, and the five of them were together the night they crossed a construction site and had their lives changed forever.

They met an Andalite, an alien, named Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul that night, who told them that a secret invasion of their planet by parasitic slugs called Yeerks was underway, and gave them the only weapon against them he had to give--Andalite morphing technology. From then on, the five children were able to acquire the DNA of and morph any animal they touched. They used this power to fight an undercover war against the Yeerks, striking at them where they could, despite the newly-named Animorphs (thank Marco for that one) being small and the Yeerks being many. Elfangor was killed that first night by Visser Three, a powerful Yeerk inhabiting the body of another Andalite, but the Animorphs were soon joined by Elfangor's little brother, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, or Ax for short, who Tobias would become close friends with.

Tobias, the first of the children to try morphing, was also their first casualty. In an early invasion of the Yeerk pool, Tobias stayed too long in his red-tailed hawk morph (the time limit is two hours) and was permanently trapped. Initially he was conflicted over the hawk's desire to kill and eat fresh meat, but eventually he accepted that he was part hawk as well as human now and began to live more truly as a hawk, making a home for himself in the wild and hunting his food. Though more accepting of the strange turn his life had taken, he experienced anguish over the loss of life as a normal human until the Ellimist, an extremely powerful cosmic being, restored Tobias's power to morph and also, through a trick of time, allowed him to acquire himself so that he could from then on morph to human, also giving him the option of staying in human morph over the two hour time limit, thus remaining human for good. Tobias chose to remain a red-tailed hawk who could occasionally become human, leading the other Animorphs to wonder if Tobias's initial "accident" had really been an accident at all.

As time and the war went on, Tobias found his feelings for Rachel deepening, though as always he was torn between his life as a hawk, in which a relationship with Rachel would be impossible, and the prospect of life as a human, in which he would continue not to belong anywhere (and cease being an Animorph). When a long-lost cousin offering Tobias a home turned out to be Visser Three in human morph, that seemed like the end of Tobias's search for family--until the disguised Visser Three revealed to Tobias that his father is none other than Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, who had lived on Earth for a time in human morph with Tobias's mother Loren. This deepened his relationship with Ax, who in addition to being what Ax called shorm, or the closest kind of friend, is also, strangely enough, his uncle.

The war continued to consume them all, drawing them into ever-more violent battles and ever-more difficult decisions. Tobias was captured and viciously tortured by a delusional Yeerk in the body of a human named Taylor, and met his father Elfangor again in a sort of pre-death hallucination. Rachel nearly killed Taylor after seeing what she had done to Tobias; Tobias however convinced her not to, telling her to "be Rachel, not [Taylor]".

By that time Tobias was fifteen, and the war was beginning to draw toward its final conclusion. None of them knew what could be coming, only that one way or another, everything must come to end...

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